— eddy

Readers Choice 2004 for Persistence Framework

Of course, I’m sure one can easily find another survey with radically different results. And lots of things have changed since 2004…

I used JDO and JPOX during my Software Architecture labs last semester and I was very satisfied. The integration with Eclipse (with the appropriate plugin) is great: instrumenting existing classes works really well. I’m just trying Hibernate to learn something new…

Pity we couldn’t meet. When are you both leaving? We could have lunch or dinner somewhere…

To Raj:

It’s true that most programmers have to deal with existing legacy database schemas. This is something that is acknowledged in the Hibernate documentation. As I told you, I intend to have a look at iBatis next

http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/hibernate_vs_ibatis

The team I work in doesn’t use Hibernate. The main reason being that sometimes it’s easier and faster to write your own SQL queries in stored procedures etc., specially when the same database/tables are used by more than one application. When you use OOAD and design your objects first which then generate the necessary database schema then Hibernate is fine. Unfortunately, very rarely do you have the luxury of starting a database from scratch, most of the times there are things already in place and you have to add up to it and live with a previously design schema. And most important of all if you come from the very old school, like me , where you design your database first, make heavy use of stored procedures then the application using tools like Hibernate becomes problematic. This where IBatis comes in. They promote it as something that gives the developer full control of object mappings. To be honest I’ve only tried a couple of iBatis samples using one of it’s tutorials and I liked it because many of the things it does through a SQLMap I used to hand code them in .NET, well partially because most of the time I generate the .NET code using a mix of Excel macros (yes you can) and Query Analyser. For example in SQL Server 2000

select column_name, data_type, character_maximum_length from
information_schema.columns where table_name = ‘Person’
order by ordinal_position

gives you the column names, data type and width of a table. So, it’s very easy to write some more SQL statements to generate the necessary getters and setters for a table. I know there are many tools, free and commercial that do that for you but I’ve found it easier to use my own

@Avinash: Caught a glimpse of you at Shoprite. Would have said hello, but as always, I could not recognise a face. My wife told me it was you, but then it was too late.

— Eddy

In fact, whenever Hibernate (or JDO) is mentioned, iBatis is also mentioned as an alternative.

I have the intention to cast a glance at iBatis in a few weeks. I’ve started with Hibernate because of its promise to allow a developer to write an enterprise application without writing a single line of SQL. I am not afraid of SQL (in fact I find SQL cool) but I want to see if that (grand) promise really works

Do you use those technologies where you work?